Thursday, 27 September 2018

A very interesting list appeared last week from New York Magazine and Vulture (and I just love the supercool graphic for the article). An attempt at establishing a 21st century cannon. An ambitious pursuit. This is not the first time I've seen a list trying to do this, but is the biggest list thus far. The list encompasses fiction, memoir, poetry and essays.

I think probably the most remarkable thing about this list (apart from how few I've read) is how few of these books are books, and authors, that I've never even heard of. 49/100. Yes, just about half, including I think, the best book of the century so far. I feel like I might have heard of The Last Samurai, but I really think I'm just really remembering the 2003 Tom Cruise movie of the same name - which is not at all related to the book, and one that I've never actually seen, samurai action films not being my thing.

Sadly I do think that I don't actually want to read a fair proportion of the books that I hadn't already heard of. Many of the others are on my TBR. I have a few of them in the house. The list was collated from selections by 31 critics and authors. Only seven of them agreed on The Last Samurai. It is of course a very Amero-centric list. Peter Carey, an Australian who has lived in America for decades, is the only Australian to make the list.

Sunday, 23 September 2018

I do love a verse novel, so I was very excited when I spied The Art of Taxidermy in the Text Catalogue earlier in the year. I eagerly awaited the publication date, and then ordered it from my local bookshop. I picked it up this week. I've really been in a bit of a reading slump for the past few months (and a blogging slump too), and I thought a verse novel would be good for what ails me. It was. The Art of Taxidermy tells the story of Charlotte, Lottie, living in South Australia with her father. Her mother has died and her Aunt Hilda hovers closely, helping look after both Charlotte and her father. Lottie is 11. She is a rather sad and lonely child. Alone at school.

Back there with the kids

who didn't talk to me

was like being at a funeral

every day.

Lottie becomes obsessed with death.

At the age of eleven

I fell in love

with death

She starts collecting dead things - frogs, skinks, lots of birds, even a red-bellied black snake. But of course all this creates a "fusty fug" in her bedroom and attracts the attention of Aunt Hilda, who is far from enthusiastic about Charlotte's new hobby. On a visit to the museum with her scientist father Charlotte sees taxidermied specimens for the first time.

They are perfect-

perfectly dead.

Not shrinking?

Not disintegrating?

Lottie becomes even more interested in the dead, subsuming her grief for her mother.

I pulled on layer after layer of her:underwear, stockings,shirts and skirts,coat and shoes.I wrapped myself in herfolded myself upuntil it feltlike a warm hug.

Besides the more obvious themes of grief and death, there are themes of friendship, loneliness, glimpses of Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal relations with white Australia, and the history of German immigrants to South Australia. The book is also full of appreciation for our Australian wildlife and in particular our wonderful birds. The Art of Taxidermy was shortlisted for the 2017 Text Prize. The gorgeous cover and illustrations are by Edith Rewa. Sharon Kernot is a South Australian author and poet. The Art of Taxidermy is her second novel. Teaching Notes

Thursday, 13 September 2018

A separation and divorce makes you reconsider pretty much everything in your life and I've been doing quite a bit of reconsidering lately. Of course there are so very many changes over this time, some positive, some not so much, but there are also many new horizons, new opportunities, many new and different ways of looking at and doing things. One of the big ones is the way that you do things with money. It can take a while to realise that this doesn't need to be the same as when you were married. Especially if that way wasn't working particularly well for you anyway. It's important to do things your own way now.I'd never paid all that much attention to our finances during the marriage. I earn a good wage and I thought that that would be enough and things would just happen. Well, they don't just happen, you still need to do things to make them happen. But I'm doing those things now. I've come a long way in the past three years, and more particularly in the past year. I'm debt free (apart from the mortgage) but things can always be better. I've come to realise that just because things had been done a certain way for the past 20 years they may no longer feel right, that way may not fit me any more. I've already changed a lot of things that I do in my life. So, it was time to really look at matters financial.I reserved The Barefoot Investor at my library and got cracking. The Barefoot Investor has been huge over the past few years, with over 850,000 copies sold! Clearly lots of people have found Scott Pape's methods helpful. It's a quick enjoyable read for a finance book, although I found his jocular, blokey banter a bit much at times.A lot of the Barefoot message is about empowerment and control, control over your money and your life.

The goal of the Barefoot Investor can be summarised in one word: control.

Scott has nine steps to financial freedom. Most are very sensible things. Consolidate and pay off your debts. Have a buffer for emergencies. Buy your house. Get your super in order. He has a specific way of doing this with multiple buckets (separate online accounts where you parcel off your money).

The bucket system doesn't appeal to me really. I don't want to do that, so I'm not going to. And I don't think I need to. I'm starting this process at Step 7.I do like that he doesn't like budgets though. I really don't like budgets and don't work well within one.

For most people, budgets don't work. They're like surviving on a grapefruit diet.

Budgets set you up to fail. You feel like a loser with no willpower.

Exactly.But Scott Pape is big on conscious spending. Which dovetails very nicely with the decluttering and minimalistic (lite, super extra lite minimalist) approach that I've been trying to adopt of late.

Environment Victoria says the vast majority of what we buy ends up in landfill within six weeks of purchase.

Six weeks! Can that really be true? I don't see how. Food and consumables sure. But the rest of it? It's hard to imagine. Scott's sensible advice has helped me work out my priorities, and some strategies.

Become an investor, not a trader.

Make saving automatic. Increase your pre-tax super to 15% (or up to $25, 000 - the current annual maximum).

Super should be the centrepiece of your long-term investment program.

The best place to invest your money for the long term, regardless of your age, is super.

Your greatest investment weapon is time.

Great. Time isn't exactly on my side, but I can certainly make use of the time I have left as a worker. Speaking of which, Scott is a big advocate to "Never, Ever Retire"! What? I've just really started thinking about how to make retirement happen, and now he's telling me I shouldn't ever retire... Well we'll see about that I guess.I wish I had made many of these decisions and changes years ago. But I didn't, and there's nothing I can do about that. But I'm making the right moves now. Scott likes to say "I've got this". I haven't got it yet, but every fortnight it's coming closer. And I might just get myself a new pillow. You can listen to Scott Pape on a podcast with Mia Freedman.

Friday, 7 September 2018

I grew up in Newcastle. Well close enough. Much easier to say Newcastle, so people know where you mean. When I grew up the boys all went off to work at Comm Steel and BHP, major industries that don't exist anymore. Newcastle has been the inspiration for a number of songs. The Newcastle Song. We all grew up knowing "Don't you ever let a chance go by."

So you can imagine my surprise when I was catching up on a recent SMH article, and saw this written bold and large:

Newcastle is now ranked as one of the world's top five hipster cities

What? Really? Hipsters? Can a deconstructed vegemite toast really be the basis of all this acclaim?

I didn't have much of a problem with the second half of the sentence

and is welcoming a growing literary scene.

Sure. That bit is easy. I've loved attending the Newcastle Writers Festival three times over the past few years, and I'm aware of more and more writers and poets calling Newcastle home. The hipster claim appears to be old news. And I'd still agree that "you’ll see more hipsters in the first ten meters of Crown Street, Surry Hills than you will in a week in Newcastle".

One of the interesting things that the article did was include a list of Newcastle Novels, and even though the lists have been light on here for a while, I knew I couldn't let this chance go by...

Newcastle Novels

Lover's Knots: A Hundred Year Novel - Marion Halligan 1992

Paterson - William Carlos Williams 1963

Southern Steel - Dymphna Cusack 1953

The Last Thread - Michael Sala 2012

The Long Prospect - Elizabeth Harrower 1958

The Restorer - Michael Sala 2017

Sadly I haven't read any of these books. There's always so much reading to be done.